THE GRAMMATICAL TERMS AL-MUSNAD, AL-MUSNAD ILAYHI AND AL-ISNāD

In the works of the Arap grammarians we find two essential views of the musnad and the musnad ileyh: the ancient view held by Sibāwayh (eighth century) and most likely by al-Mubarrad (ninth century), and the later view which prevails in the sources beginning with the tenth century. According to Sibāwayh and al-Mubarrad, both the musnad and the musnad ilayh are two indispensable parts of the sentence. Sibāwayh’s criterion for the distinction between the musnad and the musnad ilayh is their sequence in the sentence, and not their syntactic function: the musnad is the first indispensable part of the sentence, and the musnad ilayh is the second indispensable part. In the later sources, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, the attitude to the musnad and the musnad ilayh is completely different from that of Sibāwayh. In these sources the term musnad denotes the predicate and the term musnad ilayh denotes the subject of all types of sentences. In these souurces the criterion for the distinction between the two terms is the syntactic function of the musnad and the musnad ilayh respectively, while the word order becomes irrelevant. In the same sources, asnadahu ilā occurs as a technical grammatical expression meaning “to assign a predicate to a subject”. The masdar of asnada ilā, which is al-isnad ilā or al-isnad denotes, in these sources, “the assignment of the predicate to the subject”.